Longmont readies for budget 'reset'

Priority-based system takes first step in multi-year process.

LONGMONT -- This budget season, Longmont will start getting to the point. Actually, it'll start getting to several points.

During its annual retreat Saturday, the Longmont City Council took its first steps into a "priority-based" budget system. The method requires a city government to evaluate and define its goals, review what it's already doing, and then score each piece of the budget. The more points a program gets, the more integral it is.

The scores themselves are based not just on whether a program fits the priorities, but also on whether a program is mandated, how much it pays for its own operation, how much demand there is, how much of the community it serves, and whether the city is the only one providing the service.

The idea, said Jon Johnson and Chris Fabian of the non-profit Center for Priority-Based Budgeting, is to make it possible for a city council to plan and get a big picture of the city, rather than drown in a sea of line-items.

"I spent 30 years on the other side of the dais, believing I was doing everything that needed to be done," said Johnson, a former Jefferson County budget director. "We had lots of data, graphs, I felt like I was so thorough. But as I walked away, I could hear -- because someone forgot to turn off their microphone -- 'What the hell did he just say?'"

But to get there, a city has to decide what it is and what it wants to be. Without that perspective, City Manager Harold Dominguez said, the city is more or less at the mercy of the next big economic swing.

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"There's been times that we've gotten really lucky," Dominguez said.

The process starts by having the city government define, in broad terms, what exactly it's in business to do.

Most cities tend to name similar items, such as providing a safe community or being good environmental stewards. But these are meant to be more than vague vision statements. Once it has those core ideas, a city needs to define what it means by them.

Those definitions can vary a lot from town to town. Most places, Fabian said, include police and fire as part of a "safe community," but Cincinnati went a bit farther.

"They defined a safe community as one that cares for the physical and mental well-being of its citizens," he said. As a result, he said, a lot of their social programs scored high for importance.

Based on their scores, the various budget items are placed in four "quartiles." Quartiles one and two are the items most important to the city's plans, quartiles three and four are less important areas.

"This doesn't mean you have to cut all of them," facilitator Kathie Novak said. "But you can start asking questions like 'Do we have to spend as much money' or 'Can we partner?'"

The quartiles do not have to be equal fourths. For example, if several items score well, it's possible for most of the budget to land in quartiles one and two, with fewer items in the bottom tiers.

"This allows us to look at all the services we have," Dominguez said.

The discussion begins the city's budget "reset"-- but not very quickly. Some of the groundwork will be laid this year, Dominguez said, but the priority-based method will get more of a chance to take hold in 2015.

Meanwhile, the council got to work on Longmont's own core areas. Starting with broad areas such as "safe community," "infrastructure" or "fun stuff to do," council members began to throw out specific examples of what they meant, like "reliable power," "library," or "a place where parents know their children will be OK." (The examples will be condensed into categories for a later meeting.)

Unlike previous retreats, the Friday and Saturday meetings didn't pick a handful of key issues and have the council drill down on them. But that was OK, Councilwoman Katie Witt said.

"Although we didn't cover a lot of topics, we did get a lot done on something major," she said.

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